Four letters written by Lady Emily Tennyson to her sister
Anne and niece Agnes Weld taken from my
copy of The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson by James O. Hoge, The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1974 edition.

1) To Anne Weld

Aldworth,
8 August 1892

My dearest
Nanny,

I am sorry
to say that my Ally is still suffering from gout in the

throat and
jaw which greatly depresses him. We say as little as

may be
about this; the newspapers, if they got hold of it,

would bring
endless trouble of letters, etc. Very kindly meant

but very
distressing to recipients.

Our lawyers
and yours have sent us the particulars of the

Somersby
estate which is to be sold in a few days and which

they want
us to buy, but as £80,000 is waned and probably 50

or 60 will
be got for it some millionaire must buy it for us as

we should
have to sell all our belongings to purchase it

ourselves .
. .

*Footnote: The present owner of the old rectory at
Somersby, now called

Somersby House, is Lady Maitland, wife of Sir John
Maitland, of Harrington Hall.

The present occupant is William Maitland, their
eldest son.

2) To Anne and Agnes Weld

Aldworth,
18 September 1892

My dearest
Nanny and Agnes,

My poor
Ally has been very unwell. When Hallam came home

he
telegraphed for Dr. Dabbs and I had had two doctors

before.
Thank God Ally seems better now.

3) To Anne and Agnes Weld

Aldworth,
3 October 1892

(written
three days before his death)

My dearest
Nanny and Agnes,

He became
very ill the day Sir Andrew left. Dr. Dabbs has

been most
kind. He has been with us six nights; he stayed all

day yesterday
and is coming again this evening and we have

two nurses.
He has milk and brandy and such things every two

hours . . .
Thank God Dr. Dabbs is hopeful now.

If you like
to show this to dear Mr. Jowett, do. You may

consider that
things are going on as well as can be expected if

you hear
nothing. He is, of course, in bed.

*Footnote:Sir Andrew Clark, who came from London on 29 September, thought

the poet’s condition not so very serious, but the
next day, after Clark left,

Tennyson was very much worse. With Emily, Hallam,
and Audrey at his side, Tennyson died at 1:35a.m.

on 6 October.

4) To Anne and Agnes Weld (Emily Tennyson’s letter
written just five days after the death of her husband, “Ally.”)

“In the autumn of 1892, Alfred Tenyson lay dying
at Aldworth, the house near Haslemere that he and his wife had planned
together. Emily, in all the accounts, is a shadowy figure, led back and forth
from the sickroom to her own nearby room by the devoted son, Hallam.She seems to be passive, to need protection
from the nastier side of death. Her daughter-in-law, sensible, helpful Audrey,
records nearly everything. But the vomiting and enemas will be left out of the
son’s account, the massive Memoir for which Audrey is keeping these notes, just
as Emily herself had recorded over the years, at Tennyson’s suggestion, the ‘something-nothings’
of the poet’s life-and of her own life with which for forty-two years it had
been so intricately entwined. In this deathbed diary, Emily Tennyson Is not described.
She is hardly there. All the attention is of course on the poet himself.

On 28 September Tennyson’s ‘sickness had gone on
so long’ – an aching throat and jaw and other things too-that it was decided to
summon to Aldworth Sir Andrew Clark, the distinguished physician whom Tennyson
had first met socially at the Gladstones.’

He arrived in the evening with Lady Clark, and
seemed quite annoyed at not finding him, as he considered, more ill, Audrey
wrote in her diary, It was Dr. Dabbs, George Dabbs, arriving from the Isle of
Wight, who realized how serious things were. At this stage the plan was to move
Tennyson to Farringford, if he was fit to be moved. It was certainly in Emily’s
mind that that was where he should die, if the time had really come for him to
die. But Tennyson was too ill to be moved.

Over the days of Tennyson’s dying, Emily sat for
the most part alone, praying and reading. ‘I went in to see my Mother in law,’ Audrey
wrote in her diary, ‘and asked her if she would like me to sit in the room with
her, but she said tho’ grateful she would rather be alone.

Emily’s own book of prayers was a collection of
loose pages enclosed in a black binding with ELEGIES in gold on the spine. On
the inside of the cover there still remained some lines in Tennyson’s neat
young hand:

Thou seemest human & divine

Thou madest man without, within:

Yet who shall say thou madest sin.

For who shall say ‘it is not mine’

On 4 October Dr. Dabbs told them ‘there was no
hope.’ Tennyson once told William Allingham: ‘Two things I have always been
firmly convinced of, -God, -and that death will not end my existence.’

That same day, Audrey Tennyson wrote in her diary
that her father-in-law kept ‘talking about a journey.’‘When
H (Hallam) went in, he told him he must not take him on his journey today; he
could not bear it. If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul .
. . I am going a long way . . . where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, nor
ever wind blows loudly . . .’

They tried to keep calm at Aldworth. The grandchildren,
Hallam’s children: Lionel who was nearly three and Aubrey who was eighteen
months had been sent off with their nurse to their uncle, Cecil Boyle, on 1
October. Lionel had been allowed to say goodbye to his grandfather. He
understood he was very ill and that he would soon be going away too. Telegrams
kept arriving including one from the Queen. ‘O, that Press will get hold of
it now,’ Tennyson said. The newspapers and periodicals were alerted to the
death of ‘the greatest living Englishman.’

On the day when Dr. Dabbs had given up hope, Emily
wrote a list of her own small bequests and requests to her grandsons, to their
mother Eleanor, to her niece Agnes Weld. She asked her son to give something to
her sister Anne (Nanny) and to Horatio Tennyson (Alfred’s youngest brother)
daughters, Cecy, Maud and Violet.

Wednesday, 5 October, was Tennyson’s last day
alive. Audrey recorded her father-in-law asking for a Shakespeare and lying
with his hand resting on the open page, discouraged by Hallam from trying to
read. The lovely book had once belonged
to his dearest brother Charles and carried the book plate of their Turner
great-grandfather. It was open at Cymbeline,
the first Shakespeare play Emily had read, as a child of eight, and at a tender
passage they had both loved:

Hang there, like fruit, my soul

Till the tree die.

Tennyson was finding it hard to talk and when he
did they could hardly understand what he was saying, ‘owing greatly I think to
his having no teeth in,’ noted the unpoetic Audrey. ‘My mother is crushed but brave
and thankful that he does not suffer,’ Hallam replied to the telegram
from the Queen.

At ten past four in the afternoon on 6 October, Dr
Dabbs gave Tennyson some drops of laudanum and they heard him say, after
drinking it obediently, ‘Very nasty.’At quarter past five ‘Hallam fetched his
mother in that he might recognise her,’ Audrey recorded. Hallam wrote later: ‘My
father’s last conscious effort was to call “Hallam” and whisper to his wife, “God bless you, my joy.”Tennyson’s hand was still lying quietly on
his Shakespeare, not, in its ‘last heat’
picking ‘at the deathmote on the sheet,’
as he had imagined in his misery after Arthur Hallam’s death so long before.” Excerpt from Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife
by Ann Thwaite, faber and faber, Great Britain, 1996 edition.

The Death of Lord Tennyson (1892) by Samuel Begg

I love you Alfred Lord Tennyson for your truest sense of self, for your gift of poetry, for your love of nature, for your love of family, the Lincolnshire Wolds and the Isle of Wight.

Portrait painting of Lord Tennyson by Frederic Sandys

My favorite Tennyson poem (aside from Maud) is Kate

I know her by her angry air,
Her brightblack eyes, her brightblack hair,
Her rapid laughters wild and shrill,
As laughter of the woodpecker
From the bosom of a hill.
'Tis Kate--she sayeth what she will;
For Kate hath an unbridled tongue,
Clear as the twanging of a harp.
Her heart is like a throbbing star.
Kate hath a spirit ever strung
Like a new bow, and bright and sharp
As edges of the scymetar.
Whence shall she take a fitting mate?
For Kate no common love will feel;
My woman-soldier, gallant Kate,
As pure and true as blades of steel. Kate saith "the world is void of might".
Kate saith "the men are gilded flies".
Kate snaps her fingers at my vows;
Kate will not hear of lover's sighs.
I would I were an armèd knight,
Far famed for wellwon enterprise,
And wearing on my swarthy brows
The garland of new-wreathed emprise:
For in a moment I would pierce
The blackest files of clanging fight,
And strongly strike to left and right,
In dreaming of my lady's eyes.
Oh! Kate loves well the bold and fierce;
But none are bold enough for Kate,
She cannot find a fitting mate.

Hi Kevin, yes I know but I thought even with all the medicine he'd been given near the end that he was still very much aware of what was going on around him! A fitting passing for such a very fine man. Thanks so much for commenting.

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